Vientiane Times IT my second article June 26th

My second article of Computers History has been published. There will be three parts altogether. This article covered many interesting events in the history making of computer scientists starting early of 1900's towards the end of 1970.

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Hollerith's invention, known as the Hollerith desk, consisted of a card reader which sensed the holes in the cards, a gear driven mechanism which could count (using Pascal's mechanism which we still see in car odometers), and a large wall of dial indicators (a car speedometer is a dial indicator) to display the results of the count.

Hollerith built a company, the Tabulating Machine Company which, after a few buyouts, eventually became International Business Machines, known today as IBM. IBM grew rapidly and punched cards became ubiquitous...

Entering the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer.
.... One of the primary programmers for the Mark I was a woman, Grace Hopper. Hopper found the first computer "bug" and it was the word "bug" had been used to describe a defect since at least 1889 but Hopper is credited with coining the word "debugging" to describe the work to eliminate program faults. Around 1953 Grace Hopper invented the first high-level language, "Flow-matic" and eventually became COBOL which was the language most affected by the infamous Y2K problem. A high-level language is worthless without a program -- known as a compiler -- to translate it into the binary language of the computer and hence Grace Hopper also constructed the world's first compiler.

In 1959, the IBM Stretch computer was constructed of 33 foot length and hold the 150,000 transistors (this later became what is I called now a Mainframe).

One interesting aspect of computer comes around 1937 when by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University, attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital computer. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or dynamic RAM). Professor Atanasoff was considered a forefather of modern digital computer by most scholars.

Another candidate for granddaddy of the modern computer was Colossus, built during World War II by Britain for the purpose of breaking the cryptographic codes used by Germany.

The Harvard Mark I, the Atanasoff-Berry computer, and the British Colossus all made important contributions to evolution of modern computers. Both American and British computer pioneers were still arguing over who was first to do what, when in 1965 the work of the German named Konrad Zuse was published for the first time in English. Zuse had built a sequence of general purpose computers in Germany. The first, the Z1, was built between 1936 and 1938 in the parlor of his parent's home. Zuse's third machine, the Z3, built in 1941, was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable (that is, software controlled) digital computer. Without knowledge of any calculating machine inventors since Leibniz (who lived in the 1600's), Zuse reinvented Babbage's concept of programming and decided on his own to employ binary representation for numbers.....

Will continue with more recent events in the next article....